The Edit Page 21

  They are all the same. Thank God I awoke from the dream in time to sense the blatancy of her seduction. That she would make love to me in some blind hope of attaining her freedom thereby. That hideous scene played out on the bed I so lovingly built for her, that I decorated with flounces from the trimmings of Miranda’s very dresses. I can hardly bring myself to write this scene, but I must:

  I watch as she undoes her blouse and brassiere, letting loose her large pendulous breasts. The areolas are as big as silver dollars. She kicks off her boots and pulls off her khakis and stands in her blue panties for a moment, then pulls them down and is completely naked, holding out her arms to me.

  “Here,” she says.

  And I dumbly come to her.

  “Hold me like this,” she says, putting my arms around her bare back, squashing her breasts between us.

  “Harder,” she insists. “Yes, that’s good. I told you before, I won’t break.”

  She leads me to the bed, actually pushing me down, and then lays on top of me. She begins wriggling on top of me.

  “Yes,” she whispers into my ear. A sudden darting of her tongue there sends an electric shock through my body. It is not a pleasant sensation. I suddenly see what she is up to. Her left hand is trailing down my shirt to the pocket where I always keep the hypodermic syringe for emergencies. She is sneaking her fingers there with her tongue in my ear and her pubis grinding away against my waist.

  “No!” I suddenly yell, pushing her off. “Get away from me!”

  I draw out the syringe and hold it menacingly.

  “A whore at heart!”

  I spit the words out at her, but still she holds my hand, pulling at me, thrusting her disgustingly naked pubis at me. There are stains on my pants from her juices. It is more than I can tolerate. I strike out at her, open-handed, slapping her cheek. This brings her back to reality, and by the look in her eyes I see I have made my point. She knows who is in control. Her little game won’t work on me.

  “Don’t touch me with your filth.”

  I get off the bed. She has finally shown some modesty and uses her hands to cover her nakedness. It is a gesture that takes me back over almost fifty years to a sunny day on the eastern borders of the Reich. I am on an inspection trip with Eichmann. We are following in the wake of the Einsatzgruppen, seeing how well they do their work. It is outside some shanty village in Estonia, and the Jews have finally been rounded up. The bulldozers worked during the preceding night digging deep channels like moats outside the village. The Jews are led to these ditches, are told to disrobe, and are taken in groups of twenty to be eliminated, thrown in the ditches, lime thrown over their bodies for sanitary measure, and then the next group of twenty is sent for. Birds are singing; it is early spring. Plum trees are in bloom. A plane flies high overhead. It is one of ours out on a routine reconnaissance mission. Its drone amid the birdsong is reassuring, pleasant. The staccato burst of machine guns periodically interrupts this lovely scene. I do not follow the Jews to the place of execution. I feel it is enough that I have examined the preparations. One does not want to know or see too much. But back to the gesture: Miss O’Brien’s modesty. It is the same with these Jew women. They are going to certain death, yet they hold protective hands over breasts and pubes. I see one young girl with only the beginnings of breasts and the soft down of pubic hair, and she clutches these parts as if they will fall off. Or, perish the thought, as if the sight of them will incite our troops to rape. I could assure her, that is the last thought on any of our minds. The job is hard enough without adding that to the mix. We are soldiers doing our duty, not barbarians.

  I watch this young girl being led away. She has noticed my attention and tries to keep her eyes on the ground. Her buttocks are high and tiny. I imagine she keeps her hands protecting her nakedness even as the bullets I hear instants later tear into her body, splintering her fingers; as they rip the lower hand off the wrist and penetrate her abdomen, throwing her against the mud bank of the ditch, the dirt turned to mud by the blood of those who have gone before.

  “Away!” I yell at Miss O’Brien as I move forth from the bed. Her eyes look down to her feet; they do not follow me. At the door, I look back. She is still on the bed, still covering her nakedness with her hands, still averting her eyes from mine.

  She reminds me of that young girl in Estonia so many years ago.

  “You’re still going to feed me, then?”

  “Of course. What did you think?”

  “I don’t know. I’m the pariah now, aren’t I? Jezebel, et cetera. I’m sure your fertile imagination can come up with the appropriate appellation.”

  “Nothing of the sort. We’re both to blame. This sort of thing happens.”

  “Stockholm syndrome again. Is that what you think? Or that I’m like one of the Jewish women at your camp, ready to bargain sex for freedom. Or even for just two more weeks of life? Got you wondering, doesn’t it?”

  “I should think this would be a fruitless conversation. The red hen’s laying quite well again.”

  “Speaking of getting laid. Hello, Sigmund. Let’s do a word association test. Verbal Rorschach. Come on. Quit looking so glum. It was only a little cuddle then, wasn’t it? The world isn’t going to end because of it. I doubt you’ll even get pregnant. And I’m being very proper today, see. No carnal designs, yet.”

  “Miss O’Brien, you’ll pardon me for saying so, but I find this problem with your entire generation. You are so frivolous about everything. You take nothing seriously, not even the mystery of sex. Indeed, there are no mysteries you do respect.”

  “That’s because the people of your generation destroyed mystery forever by kitschifying it. You made us realists and cynics because you were such ever-loving idealists and romantics. And look at the results of your ideas. We’re frivolous because your brand of seriousness about destroyed the world.”

  “All right. I see there is no point to this.”

  “No. You’re going to listen for once.”

  “Get away from the door, Miss O’Brien.”

  “Not until you listen. You are forever opening the can of worms and then throwing your hands up at the sight of them, running off to hide like an old woman. When you should be hooking those worms up to a good hook and using them for bait to catch new ideas. You look at me as a threat. True. But not to your Nazi identity. No. Not that literal. I am a threat to your human identity. I see through you, and that is my great crime. I’ll blow your cover, put a mirror to your face and body and show you the hole where your heart should be. That’s my real crime, isn’t it? That’s why you’re holding me here.”

  “Really, Miss O’Brien. If you don’t step aside—”

  “And what’s the sentence for a mirror these days, Herr ____? Fifty to life? You talk of frivolous sex. How you honor the mystery of it. What a fucking laugh. With your SS stud farms and leaders who couldn’t get it up. Who loved dogs more than humans. That’s the German way, isn’t it now? Gas the human vermin and let the hounds eat at the table. But you’ve gone one up on them, haven’t you? You got rid of your dogs. Now you run humans in their cages. How many like me have there been before? How many human mirrors who you couldn’t look in the eyes? So, yes, I was acting out of desperation yesterday. Especially after learning about your postcard trick and then finding out what happened to your little Miranda. I was frightened. I still am. I wanted to reach you, to make you feel for once. Make you know passion at least before it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what, Miss O’Brien?”

  “For me, asshole! For my life!”

  “I must insist, Miss O’Brien.”

  “Fuck you and your insisting.”

  “All right. You ask for truth. I shall supply you with a most straightforward one. I no longer have faith in you.”

  “That’s a rich one! You no longer have faith in me. You fucking kill me, you arroga
nt asshole.”

  “That may be true. But there it is. Mutual faith and trust is integral to any amelioration of the present circumstances.”

  “So why don’t you trust me? Because I touched you with my cunt?”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  “Words again, Herr Sturmbannführer. The words bother you. More than the actions. Should we make our own speech rules like you people did? My dye-dee instead of cunt. Would that please you?”

  “—”

  “Should I play like the Jews did, then? Roll over and die? Strip and get a Zyklon shower?”

  “There you go again about the Holocaust. It’s the great liberal curse. So easy for the weak-kneed to gnash their teeth over. To point the accusing finger at Germany. But the Jews themselves were also to blame for what happened. Zionists worked hand in hand with us. Other Jews sold out their own people. Bartered and traded bodies. You’re so concerned with the truthfulness of words, then why don’t we hear of those Jews?”

  “You mean Kastner in Budapest? Not that red herring again, please. One isolated incident. And besides, he was trying to save some of the Hungarian Jews rather than have them all deported by your boss.”

  “—”

  “Well, don’t disappoint me, Herr ____. You must have some snappy retort to that one.”

  “No, none. I’m just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About why you know so much of our history. Zyklon-B, the gas used at Auschwitz. The Hungarian Jew, Kastner. Sprachregeln.”

  “Maybe you don’t know it, but there was a trial. Jerusalem in the early sixties?”

  “Yes. I know about that only too well. You’ve already told me about your interest in that trial, as a matter of fact. But I also know that you were an adolescent at the time. A young girl growing up in the west of Ireland. That television was hardly the commodity there and then that it is today in, say, New York. Yes, there are many things I am thinking about, Miss O’Brien.”

  “You’re crazy. A fucking paranoid. You think I’m a Mossad plant because I know bits and pieces of Third Reich history? You might as well round up half the civilized world if that’s the criteria. You’re public fucking knowledge, or hadn’t you realized? You and guys like you are a goddamn cottage industry for writers and researchers. I mean, Hollywood’s waiting to cast your part in its next miniseries.”

  “Is that why you’re here, then?”

  “I give up. It’s like talking to a turtle.”

  “You’ll excuse me then, Miss O’Brien. I have things to attend to. Your eggs are getting cold.”

  “You know what I just had, Herr ____?”

  “—?”

  “A shiver. Like the goose walking over my grave. You frighten me, you know that? You scare me shitless, as a matter of fact, and send cold right down to my marrow.”

  “I’m sorry I have such an unpleasant effect on you.”

  “That makes two of us. I’m not a plant, you know. You’ve got to believe that. And about yesterday. It wasn’t just a bid for freedom. I’m in your life in many ways. There’s a shared intimacy here. You cared for me at one point. I mean literally, physically, when I was ill. That creates a bond. You feel that, don’t you?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Did you hear me? Are you listening at all?”

  “I must be going now.”

  PART V

  I am listening to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Though I find most music later than the twentieth century to be decadent, there are exceptions. This is a painfully melancholy piece. It wrenches one’s very soul. It matches the day: all gray and gloom with thunder to the east. And it also matches my mood.

  But to return to my memoirs. Writing them will, I hope, act as a palliative to Miss O’Brien and her eternal bickering.

  Late in 1942, I was transferred to a new posting, one that I did not care for, but one I worked hard at, nonetheless. Relations had grown increasingly strained between Eichmann and me: He accused me of undermining his power base in Vienna. As if doing my job as diligently as possible were an affront to this man. I won commendations from Berlin and Oranienburg for my efforts. Eichmann took these to be a sign of my competition for his position. So he had me transferred to Mauthausen KZ, or concentration camp, in the late fall of 1942, something of a comedown from my duties at IVA, 4b, but I did not grouse.

  Mauthausen was the largest concentration camp in Austria, or the Danube-East District as we referred to it in the Reich. Opened in 1938, the camp was capable of holding thirty thousand undesirables and was a hotbed of activity with a quirky mix of political and criminal prisoners. Very few Jews were sent here: most of them were being resettled farther to the east.

  I remember quite well the day I traveled to my new posting. No farewell party from Eichmann, merely a second-class ticket for the morning train. Once on the train, I forgot my bitterness at my demotion and was transfixed, after we had steamed out of the precincts of Vienna, by the unrolling autumn landscape out my window—I had personally upgraded my ticket to first class and so had the compartment to myself. The charming late-fall light of almost amber hue suffused the day with a deep peaceful somnolence. When we arrived at Melk, I decided to detrain. It had been many years since I last visited the town and the lovely monastery built by Prandtauer—though monastery hardly describes this elegant castlelike edifice perched precariously on an escarpment over the river Danube. I had decided I would make this an outing and damn Eichmann for the ponce that he was.

  After surveying the fine library in the monastery, I strolled in the courtyard and then had a pleasant late lunch at an unpresuming Weingarten in the vicinity, the pine bough over the door announcing itself to me from a block away. Now as I write of it, I remember exactly what I had that day: Sulz, or headcheese, and a plate of sliced wurst and onions doused in vinegar, which I rather greedily mopped up with black bread—this latter a rather sorry wartime affair with an admixture tasting not unlike sawdust. All this accompanied by a tart white wine from the Wachau. One glass only.

  The afternoon train then took me on to the railhead at the village of Mauthausen some thirty miles away. A car from the kommandator of the camp was there to meet me. I had, in fact, kept the sergeant waiting and he showed obvious impatience at my tardiness.

  As chance would have it, I arrived at the railhead just as a load of new prisoners was arriving from the north. The sergeant indicated that I might want to stay and see the fun. But I was not amused at the sorry lot of ruffians who detrained there. They were transfers from Dachau, politicals mostly, or Reds as they were known in the KZ system for the red triangle they wore to identify them. There was also a sprinkling of Greens among them—these were prisoners of the criminal class. The boots of the waiting Schutzstaffel troops were more lenient with the Greens than the Reds, it seemed, but there was little need for violence. These men were old pros: no undue force needed to be applied to set them on the double to the camp. They knew from long and hard experience—many of the Reds having been in the KZ system since 1933—that their one chance of survival was to be unobtrusive and cooperative.

  We followed close in back of these trotting prisoners up the hill to the imposing structure of the camp itself. When I describe the structure as imposing, I am not merely using some literary convention. The whole seemed to be constructed of granite blocks, rough-hewn and quarried from the nearby hillside. Indeed, it was such quarries that provided the work for the entire camp. Two tall watchtowers flanked the huge entrance; the men continued trotting on the double into the first courtyard, the receiving area. They finally came to a halt at the base of a block of administrative offices made of the same granite blocks. This was surmounted by a balustrade along the top. From here, the camp commander, a certain Sturmbannführer Ziereis, berated the new arrivals for being such subhumans as to end their days in a KZ—he promi
sed them they would never see the free world again if he had anything to do with it. They should forget all the propaganda about reforming them to function again in the outside world; it was his job to keep them from plaguing the world with their contaminating souls. This he pledged to do even if hell froze over. If they looked sharp, they might survive without punishment. They could go on living, if this was to be called a life.

  He absolutely froze the men with the cold ruthlessness of his speech. It was delivered in such a severe and yet unimpassioned manner that it sent chills up and down even my spine. He only noticed me then—I had been sent to take over the role of administrative officer in the camp and would, therefore, be, if not an assistant, perhaps a competitor for authority. He sized me up, I thought, and decided I was unworthy of attention.

  The men still stood at a semblance of attention and Ziereis paraded back and forth on the balustrade dressed in riding boots and jodhpurs, a small-caliber rifle in his hands. Their lives and deaths were his concern and decision. His alone. God played no part at Mauthausen, he said.

  By now, the sun was setting and a chill wind came into the compound off the river along with the sound of tramping feet: the first shift was back from the quarries, each of the near skeletons in formation carrying a heavy stone. Their nightly task after laboring all day long hauling and breaking up rocks was to bring back building materials to the camp for its continual expansion. The sergeant and I in the staff car were between these workers and the new arrivals. The eyes of the former never flitted my way, either because they were too tired to be curious or because my black uniform warned them against such looks. It was said that, in some camps, prisoners would lose their lives merely for looking at a Staffel man.

  Ziereis continued hectoring the new arrivals, regardless of the exhausted men who wanted to enter the camp. He warned them against all foul vices, conspiracy to escape being foremost among these. No one escapes, he told them. No one. Death was the only way out of Mauthausen.